


the softness of him

by pillowsquids



Category: Timeless (TV 2016)
Genre: F/M, Introspection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-01
Updated: 2018-11-01
Packaged: 2019-08-14 03:10:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,221
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16484882
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pillowsquids/pseuds/pillowsquids
Summary: Flynn is soft in his love. In his affection. It doesn’t surprise her, not until she realizes that perhaps it should.Lucy reflects on herself, Flynn, and their relationship.





	the softness of him

Flynn is soft in his love. In his affection. It doesn’t surprise her, not until she realizes that perhaps it should.

His touch is gentle. His kisses a comfort.

The same hands that can snap a neck or ruthlessly pull a trigger lay docile at her waist. 

It’s been a quiet day, no Rittenhouse alarms or any other need to travel into history. Everyone has been off doing their own things, sequestered into spaces they’ve claimed for themselves and some much needed privacy. As far as Lucy is aware, only Denise is in an open area, filling out reports before she heads back home to her family for the night. That was hours ago.

Since then, she’s holed herself away in Flynn’s room, along with the man himself. They’d chatted for a while, argued the merits of historiography and why Lucy should try her hand at writing a more narrative history book.

“I’d be your biggest fan. And you’d be good at it.” His finger traces a pattern on her shoulder; she can’t tell what it is and doesn’t want to move her head from his chest to look. Cuddling in the bunker beds takes some effort, they’d spent several minutes arranging themselves to comfortably fit one very tall man and then a second, average sized person. They’re cozy now, and Lucy won’t risk upsetting the balance to find out. 

“Was the journal a narrative masterpiece?”

“The greatest work to ever be written, War and Peace is nothing in comparison to a nonchronological telling of mostly accurate history with collages for additional illustration,” he agrees solemnly. Lucy giggles. 

Here, in his arms and in the lazy Sunday bubble of tranquility, she feels safe and content. 

She hasn’t been afraid of him since the swift brutality of the Lincoln assassination, since the Hindenburg when she’d been afraid of a monster who’d murdered his family. (And that hadn't been true at all, another Rittenhouse manipulation. It hurts to remember how she'd thrown that in his face.)

He must feel things acutely, with a profoundness that should be too much to bear. The cruelty he’s seen, the cruelty he’s experienced. All the things he’s done, all the things he’s willing to do, Lucy can’t imagine a driving force lesser to the storm behind his eyes. 

A time-traveling killer. Not inaccurate, even now that she's seen so much of him, but there is more behind it and plenty beyond. 

Falling into this...thing with each other had been easy. Perhaps because it wasn't a fall at all, but a lengthy slide between drinking and commiseration, hushed conversations pressed close together, and trusting each other to see the ugly parts of themselves. It had been a descent through a multitude of intimacies that lined the soundness of their current relationship. Nothing in Lucy's life right now is as sure as this, and she can't recall ever believing so innately in something despite all her factual pragmatism warning her about getting burned yet again. 

Loving Flynn doesn’t scare her for the reasons she might have pointed out before the mess that her life has become. 

High school leading into college, until the car accident, had been a quiet sort of rebellious phase for Lucy. It meant skipping newspaper club for choir practice, choosing courses she liked over ones taught by her mother’s colleagues, joining a band and standing two steps away from abandoning everything she’d worked to achieve. It meant hanging out with the outcasts, dating an assortment of bad boy types, falling for a drummer and agreeing to sing backup for her band. 

Her attraction to Flynn feels like an echo of that time, and Lucy can’t pinpoint what it is exactly that resonates with that period of indulging her desires. 

The good girl Lucy, immediately post-near-drowning, would loudly declare that dating a murderer was a definite no. Then again, so would most people. But her life is time travel and saving history and fighting her evil family to keep the world safe. Trying to rationalize the most normal thing that’s happening to her only brings on a headache. 

Her trepidation, she figures, is actually pretty normal too, if she discounts the sci-fi absurdity that’s complicated it all. The last relationship she was in ended poorly, which has left her hesitant to forming new relationships. There, normal. If she left out a lot of stuff.

None of that has to do with Flynn himself though, not more than the place he occupies as the new relationship. What he has been, is supportive, and thoughtful, and there. 

Flynn is not a man to do things by halves and does not jump into anything without full intent to succeed. Stubbornness plays its part, but his fire draws from the vastness of the emotions he keeps firmly in check. He directs them carefully to fuel his ambitions and gives them no other outlet. 

Except for Lucy. 

When their lips meet, when his fingers tangle in her hair and her arms twine around his neck, all she feels is tenderness for this man who loves nearly too much. It's easy to lose herself in his passion, to answer with her own and pull him in further. He gives himself to her entirely, his warmth, his strength. His love. Lucy wonders if one day she will find herself so far in him, entangled with him, that she'll never emerge wholly herself. Right now, she can't bring herself to care.

Flynn nips at her lip, a reproach. “You are very far away right now, professor.”

She pulls back, catches her breath before pecking him on the nose, then settles against his chest.

“I’m quite close, actually. I was thinking about you.”

“Good to know I was doing something right.”

She smacks his side and his chuckle vibrates through her. The nerve of him, but she can’t help her own smile.

“I was thinking about how you’re just a big softie.”

He takes it as a joke, their usual ribbing until he catches her earnest expression. The disbelief rolls off him in waves.

“Yes, that’s how I’m most often described.” 

“A real teddy bear,” she teases, giving him a squeeze around the middle. More seriously, she adds, “You are though. You are good, and you care so much."

"Rufus literally called me the murder master yesterday." 

"Lovingly," she assures. His silence is telling enough. She shifts into his lap, straddling his thighs so she can look directly into his face. "You are a good man, Garcia Flynn, the best I know. You don't need to be a knight in shining armor."

He doesn't believe her, she can see it in his frown, but he's thinking about it, considers it and weighs it the way he does all her words. That must be something he’s done since before he’d met her, this version of her. He’s had years to stew over her writings in the journal, and before that he’d had to find faith in a stranger’s ludicrous offer of hope. 

Finally, still doubtful, but trusting, he nods. "Okay."

This isn't the first round of this debate, nor will it be the last. For now, Lucy is content to settle in for the night, tuck herself against Flynn's chest, and dream of having all the time in the world to keep arguing her cause.

**Author's Note:**

> oh wow I haven't written anything in years I'm so rusty but I want to get back into it so bad


End file.
